We've been asked by the charity Railway Children to find out how you feel about talking to your child about a variety of topics.

The survey should take a few minutes to complete and is open to all UK Mumsnetters with at least one child aged 6-19 years.

For every survey completed, £2 will be donated to Railway Children by Aviva, to support the work the charity does in the UK - please note you can only answer the survey once.

Everyone who takes part and adds their details at the end will also be entered into a prize draw to win VIP rugby tickets (for a family of 4) to attend the Aviva Premiership Final in May at Twickenham, courtesy of Aviva (these can be passed on to family or friends if you win but are unable to attend).

Mumsnet will be working with Railway Children over the next few months and we'll tell you more about our plans shortly.

If you have more than one child aged 6 to 19, for this survey we'd like you to please answer thinking about one of these children. It could be your boy, girl, oldest, youngest or middle child (if applicable) in this age band, please just pick one at random to answer the questions about. If you have older or younger children please answer thinking about your child aged 6 to 19.

Railway Children and Aviva would also welcome any comments you have about the issues raised in the survey on this thread so do share what you think about running away and communicating with children here.

It's interesting that the survey asks questions about whether you think low income families are more likely to run away than high income families. I'd never really put much thought into it before, but had assumed there might be a bias to low income families, but when I think about it more I guess that the figures might be more evenly spread.

I remember when I was 9 or 10 I was being bullied one day at primary school right in the middle of a class and we had a supply teacher at the time. I was really, really shy and felt too shy to tell the supply teacher what was happening because I didn't know him, so instead I just got up, ran out of the classroom, ran out of the school and went and hid behind a shed near my house. If my Grandad hadn't found me a good few hours after the school alerted my family to my disappearance, I'd have just stayed there indefinitely because I was too frightened of going home and being told off. I never really thought of that as 'running away', but I guess it was an must have been frightening for my family.

I guess what I mean is there's SO many reasons why children run away. I did know someone who ran away when he was about 15 because he had a pretty rubbish home life and was from a low income family.

Might also be interesting to see if reasons for running away change over time. Mine was just because I was a bit odd and didn't know how to communicate that I was upset, but if I'd run away when I was 15 or 16, my reasons might have been vastly different.

This is interesting, but must be hard to know how to talk to you children about this, when you hope it will never ever happen to you.